Question

I have a WCF client which uses a wsHttpBinding, I would like to enable http keep-alive.

I’m hoping I can turn this on by just changing the client config… I’ve found plenty of descriptions of how to turn on keep-alives for a basicHttp binding, but no luck with wsHttpBinding… is this possible?

Many thanks.

Here’s my client binding:

  <wsHttpBinding>
    <binding name="WSHttpBinding_IRepositoryService" closeTimeout="00:00:10"
      openTimeout="00:00:10" receiveTimeout="00:05:00" sendTimeout="00:05:00"
      bypassProxyOnLocal="false" transactionFlow="false" hostNameComparisonMode="StrongWildcard"
      maxBufferPoolSize="524288" maxReceivedMessageSize="655360" messageEncoding="Mtom"
      textEncoding="utf-8" useDefaultWebProxy="true" allowCookies="false">
      <readerQuotas maxDepth="32" maxStringContentLength="81920" maxArrayLength="163840"
        maxBytesPerRead="409600" maxNameTableCharCount="16384" />
      <reliableSession ordered="true" inactivityTimeout="00:10:00"
        enabled="true" />
      <security mode="Message">
        <transport clientCredentialType="Windows" proxyCredentialType="None"
          realm="">
          <extendedProtectionPolicy policyEnforcement="Never" />
        </transport>
        <message clientCredentialType="Windows" negotiateServiceCredential="true"
          algorithmSuite="Default" establishSecurityContext="true" />
      </security>

    </binding>
</wsHttpBinding>

Answer 1

You’ll have to use a custom binding in order to disable the Keep-Alive header, since that feature is not exposed in any of the built-in binding classes.

The easiest way to achieve this without having to define a custom binding from scratch, is to customize the existing BasicHttpBinding or WSHttpBinding instance associated to the client proxy in code.

Here’s an example:

var proxy = new MyServiceClient();
var customBinding = new CustomBinding(proxy.Endpoint.Binding);
var transportElement = customBinding.Elements.Find<HttpTransportBindingElement>();
transportElement.KeepAliveEnabled = false;

proxy.Endpoint.Binding = customBinding;